Incarceration and overpolicing please welcome kelly stimson, senior legal fellow and Deputy Director in the heritage foundations meese center for legal and judicial studies. Well, welcome to the heritage foundation. For those of you online here in person, then those whove joined us on c, were delighted to have and im really delighted and honored to welcome to heritage two friends and really giant in the criminal Justice Policy world. Dr. Barry latzer on my far left and Rafael Mangual barry is professor Professor Emeritus at the John Jay College criminal justice and at the city college of new york. He has a law degree and a ph. D. And is the author of countless articles, papers and influential books the rise and fall of Violent Crime in america. And his latest book, published last year called the myth of our punishment a defense, the american Justice System and a proposal to reduce incarceration while protecting the public Rafael Mangual is the Nick Odonnell fellow head of research for the for the policing and Public Safety initiative at the manhattan institute, a contributing editor of city journal and a member of the council on justice, he holds b. A. From City University of new york, a jd from depaul university. He, too, has written extensively criminal Justice Matters and his first book published last year is called criminal injustice what the push push for, decarceration and de policing gets and who it hurts. The most. Now format for todays event, which last an hour is moderated discussion for about 45 minutes, followed by your questions questions we receive online. So with that lets get started. And barry, i want to start with you. Your latest book book has two parts. The first part is a short history of punishment in america and the age of leniency. I want to focus on the latter part because thats appropriate. Our topic today in a chapter, the build up, you write about, quote the titanic crime wave, unquote, that struck the United States, the force of a tsunami in the late 1960s. And that went for about 30 years. And you noted. Between 1970 and 1995, there were more people murdered in this country than soldiers killed in world war to the korean war, the vietnam war, and the conflicts in iraq, afghanistan combined, and you also noted that fewer than 1 million Service Personnel suffered injuries in that same time combined, yet 2. 2 million americans per year were by Violent Crime during that time frame. So as a result of that indisputable war crime wave, what did the states do and what the result . At first they did nothing. It they were overwhelmed. It was so many Crimes Police could apprehend enough people fast when they arrested them. The courts overwhelmed with cases they didnt know to handle it. The sentences, the time served actually went down. It took a for the system to rebuild over a decade. The seventies into the eighties for the system could restore its capacity to handle this crime tsunami. And believe me i lived through it so remember it. Im old enough to remember what it was really like and and just before we went on ralph and i were talking about how crime is now in the subway and whatever it is now a heck of a lot worse back then it was really really frightening and of course the big cities losing tourism people didnt want to come to the city. Right. And therefore the restaurants were losing money. The the venues for entertain ment were going down. They were in trouble. I mean the United States was under. And thats why its remarkable to me that you dont have bunches of books on the crime wave and you dont and you actually have people who deny that was a crime wave that is simply unbelievable to. Me thats the ostrich approach to social problems, right . If i put my head in the sand, maybe itll go away. Let me pick up on a word you used. You said the system and talk to us about how theres not really system. Theres 18,000 Police Departments around the country. Theres 2300 elected days. Theres 50 states, theres thousands of counties. Put more words around that because its not a system all walked in lockstep. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, thats why its so to turn it around right. Were not talking about even one big ship. Were talking about multiple multi the Police System and theyre largely locally controlled or state controlled. So the prisons are state, the cops are largely municipality run. And so you cant the whole thing around at once. Thats not going to happen in the United States but you can turn things around eventually. Thats why there was this lag, why it needed a decade or more before we our capacity to deal with this crime tsunami. Well, lets pick up on the lag, because you describe the lag between crime rising and imprisoning rates, imprisonment rates. And you explain that that lag has happened twice now since then. Yes. Put more words around what the lag means and, what we should think about it. Well, the critics of imprison and of course, love to point out that the imprisonment were real low in the late sixties, early seventies. True, right. And they soared going into the eighties through. But this was the response to the crime tsunami, of course. And it took that longer time to develop that kind of response this is nothing that you can do in the short run, but that necessitated by the big crime rise. Thats why you had to have this rise in imprisonment. So course theres a huge lag crime rising late sixties, early seventies, mid 70 years and the capaz city of the system to deal with it doesnt go like that takes a decade or more before it could deal with it. So eventually the imprisonment do rise. They rise high. Okay, but not. But thats because its responding to the crime wave. And i want to bring you into this, rafael, but you you go to great detail on your book about what many of the states did. They talked they had legislative proposals, some passed, some some didnt some that passed. It realized it didnt go far enough. Then they had to build out the capacity for, the prisons in the state system. So inevitably, because those folks over there on the hill, they take a long time to get things done. Sometimes these state legislatures were chewing through all of this. Is that part of the the problem . Well, yes, sure, sure. The federal government created incentive truth and sentencing law, for instance, mandatory minimum laws the federal government created. And incentives for the states to act. So that did help put things on the track. But again its sure its up to each state legislature do the job when it comes to imprisonment. New york bills, a slew of prisons. Back then there was a rise in the number of prisons the United States. Now, of course, the left generally deplores this. Now they say, oh, thats awful. You know, mass incarceration. But this didnt happen because of nothing. This happened of a huge something that terrified the american public. Dont jump in here. Yeah. I mean, i think whats really interesting about that is despite the fact that there was this lag between the build up of incarceration in the United States and the sort of rising crime you can go back to the mid 1970s and sort of follow the public debates. And what youll find is that even then, people were sort of left of Center Reform advocates, were criticizing what they essentially characterized as mass incarceration back then. I mean, you can go back and, read james q wilsons thinking about crime, which was First Published in 1975, where hes essentially to the same sorts of arguments that were hearing today about the need to cut down on the punitive response to crime, to invest in rehabilitation. He was one of the foremost advocates kind of pushing back on that, even in the mid 1970s. And so what that tells us about today that, you know, whatever level of weve been able to achieve in the last ten, 15 years, whatever level decarceration we achieve in the next ten, 15 years, which you can expect is, you know, critics of the system are never going to be fully satisfied. And that, i think, poses one of the most significant dangers to people who are stuck living in the enclaves where crime is highest. And thats why we wrote our books basically. I mean, it wasnt a conspiracy, by the way. We tried it independently, but thats why we wrote our books, because i kept reading about all this mass incarceration and mass incarceration. What are they talking about . I mean, you got to look at the numbers you have to deal with realities. The statistical read, how were these . How long do prisoners serve in the United States . Dont tell me about the 40 year sentence. I want to know long. Theyre actually behind bars. Answer two years or less to thirds were out in two years or less. That doesnt sound so awful to me. I once was in a debate with a professor and he said, two years. Thats a long prison sentence. So i didnt have the presence of mind. I should have said, yeah, for a guy like you, that would be a very long prison sentence. Youre just a week, professor, so you couldnt take it if you were a tough street guy, you could take it. In fact, you could take it on one leg. Yeah, theres theres just such an incongruity between the reality on the ground that illustrated by the data. As barry notes, what the narrative is that really drives reform agenda, right . I mean, you know, we hear terms like mass incarceration. We hear terms like Second Chances or we have Second Chance month in the United States. And the whole idea behind this is that, you know, our country systematically denies people the ability to have a second crack, a second bite at the apple, a Second Chance in this pretends as if someone, you know, gets caught smoking a joint. Then theyre doing a 30 year prison sentence. The reality is just the opposite. If you look at the typical person in state prison, what youre going to find is someone who has between ten and 12 prior arrests and between five and six prior convictions. These are not people who are being denied Second Chances. Were giving people multiple bite at the apple. And what i really wrote my book to help the public understand is that with bite of the apple that we give a repeat offender, were essentially rolling the dice, but were not rolling the dice with our own lives, rolling the dice with the lives of people who are living in places where the National Crime numbers i mean, dont even come close to representing how dangerous, you know, day to day life truly is. I mean, there was a mention of the fatalities and, casualties in the recent wars. I mean, there are parts of this country, you know, neighborhoods, ten, 15, block radius where the homicide is significantly higher than your chances of dying on battlefields in iraq and afghanistan or even in the ukraine. Yeah. So, you know, in imagine, you know, a mothers fear sending her child off to the marines in 2000 to, you know what that would be. And now try to imagine living in a place like West Garfield Park, chicago, which in 2019 had a homicide rate of 131 per 100,000, which makes it one of the most dangerous places, not just in the country, but in the world, where if you are a young male, your chances of being killed are about on with your chances of going to graduate. And so, you know, thats really what i wanted people to to understand from my book is that, you know, despite the fact that all of these reforms are pushed in the name of equity, are in the name of Racial Justice and social justice, the reality is, is that the most persistent and starkest disparities that we see in this country, in the criminal justice world, come in the form of victimization. So as you both, weve been writing about progressive and we did a bunch of book. We have a book coming out in march. We did two symposia. We did a short video about a career criminal austin davidson, the way comic county sheriff. Right here is mike lewis, one of his Deputy Sheriffs was killed by a career criminal who had 29 interactions with law enforcement. He murdered Deputy Sheriff hilliard and he was on probation for armed robbery. And had four open warrants in. Maryland, when they went to pick him up and he killed. So this is your typical yeah. Career criminal. Yeah but let me go back, barry, because i want to set the stage for a more granular discussion. Some of the things you both each write in your book, in prism. It lags the crime wave to the wave peaked around 92, 93, and then it started going down drastically. You dont really hear about it going down because people dont want to acknowledge that the imprisonment as much as its distasteful and necessary, worked yeah. And the alternatives to incarceration, especially courts and all the rest of it helped drive down Violent Crime and property crime. And you have a slide in your book. And if we could pull up the slide, i it would be helpful to see that this is a pew research slide that shows that how how that actually worked and its been going down since for about 30 years. Talk more about that. Well, thats the second layer you mentioned earlier. I didnt respond to you, but thats the second lag between. Imprisonment and crime the first one was crime was rising and high. And it took a long time the system was able to build itself up. The second leg. Is that crime is now receding and the punishment system is still pretty potent. Pretty powerful. So of course the left criticizes the second leg and ignores the first leg right. They only want to tell you about terribly high imprisoned rate and they ignore the first leg when the system respond to the crime rise. Well, of course, the second leg and the first leg are both reflective of the same. And that is its hard to steer the big ship around. And its its really the same kind of problem. But if we do decarceration and we do it in an irrational like just releasing people arbitrarily, not misdemeanors, as some these progressive prosecutors are not only proposing but doing if we do this kind of our arbitrary release of offenders. Well, what were inviting, of course is another crime wave. Its kind of obvious weakness in the criminal Justice System was not the only factor explaining the rise of crime in the late, but it was a key factor. So if we weaken the system, we run the risk of. Inspiring another crime. This was the late eric monk and this theory, you know, he said when we go all permissive, when we become too lenient, that encourages more crime, then we toughen up and crime goes down and the cycle continues that way. So his theory could well be borne out if we keep weakening the criminal Justice System and weve seen this weakening in the last decade at least. Right. And the second part of your subtitle and, who it hurts the most, you say in your book about the geographical and demographic concentration of crime. And you note in new york city, at least 2008, around 95 of the citys shooting victims have been either black or hispanic. And that, while black, constitute. 13. 4 of the population and they make up more 53 of the nations homicide victims in 2020. Yeah. Yeah. Talk more about that, by the way. Thats a typical thats a typical. Thats just 2020. Thats i have data going back to the beginning of the 20th century reflecting that same thing. Yeah i mean the reason they to spend so much time on the concentration of crime as an issue is because, you know, theres an understandable colloquialism that prevails in this country, and that is to talk about crime in National Terms or in broad geographic terms. You hear about chicago crime in new york or, you know, us crime. And the reality is, is that the vast majority of the United States is the safest the safest in the world. You know what we have that lots of other donor these pockets of very highly crime places like West Garfield Park chicago. Right i in the book i do this where i pick out the ten most dangerous neighborhoods in the city of chicago and the ten safest neighborhoods in the city of chicago the ten safest neighborhoods had a collective rate of about 1. 6 or 1. 8 per 100,000, and they had 200,000 more residents than the ten most dangerous neighborhoods, which had a collective homicide rate in, excess of 61 per 100,000. And again, of those neighborhoods within that collection had homicide rates that were double that. And so, you know what have to understand is that crime concentrates at the very hyper local level. If you take new york city as an example, three and a half percent of our street segments in a given year, a street segment, if youre thinking a city block would be one side of the block, both sidewalks of to corner to sidewalk, they see 50 of all the Violent Crime. 1 of our streets. They can see 25 of all the violent. Now, why is it important to understand this . Why is it important to understand this in the context of the democrat concentration of crime . One major reason is that we know the reform debate is driven in large part by concerns about racial in the system, Racial Disparities in enforcement. But if the reality that crime concentrates geographically in a very, very small and certain demographic groups are in those places, well, if the system if it policing, for example, is responsive to that phenomenon, then that is by definition going to generate disparities enforcement. And you have to contextual wise those disparities in light of the reality of crime concentration in order to fully understand whats happening. It is not of racism that you quote unquote overrepresentation of certain groups in the enforcement. Its evidence of responsiveness on the part of the system